It’s the ultimate question if you have ever even minutely searched for ways to make money online. Internet marketing, online marketing, affiliate marketing…they’re all pretty much the same thing and they’ll be lumped in together quite a bit, but the one key ingredient to understanding exactly what makes it work IS internet marketing.
So What the Heck is Internet Marketing?
In it’s simplest form and explanation, internet marketing is just a way to market or promote anything online. The reasons you choose to market online will vary from person to person. For example, marketing your own business to build a name for yourself or selling something online whether it be for an affiliate program or a product you have created yourself.
There are literally thousands of reasons someone would market themselves online, but it all boils down to one thing – to make money. Some way or another online marketing relates to making money. In today’s everyday life, the internet takes a high priority over, well… everything. Think about it. When is the last time you bought something online or not without first doing a quick Google search on it? Whether it be to read reviews on the product, or to find out what the average price something is, or to find the lowest price.
Ways to Market Yourself (or Your Website)
Gone are the days when you could just put up a website and stuff some keywords in the article and title, buy yourself some crappy back links and boom, the search engines would reward you with high rankings. Believe it or not, that used to work! You could easily manipulate the search engines to get your site or article ranked. If you recall back in the day, when searching for anything the chances were extremely high that you would land on a webpage that was entirely irrelevant to your actual search. Guess what? The search engines have become smart now. Google’s entire algorithm is now based on user experience. That means it is now smart enough to know the difference between a good website and a bad one.
One of the most effective ways to start marketing your website is by using social media sites. One of the ways the search engines can determine if your site is worth it or not is if other people are liking and sharing your information. If normal people are sharing it, then clearly it’s a good user experience. So like it or not, if you’re not marketing your website on the social sites, you’re doing yourself a huge injustice. Make it easy for your visitors to share your content by adding social share buttons to all of your posts. Also, bookmark your posts to your favorite bookmarking sites. This will drive traffic back to your site, but also get you some quick backlinks.
Another way to market yourself online is article marketing. I know, it sucks. You spend all day writing quality content just to spend even more time writing quality articles for article directories. No one likes to do it (well maybe they do, but to be completely honest, I’d rather put my best content on my website rather than waste it and submit it to article directories.) The cold hard truth here though, is you have to submit quality content to the article directories as well. The key to doing this well is by changing your mindset. Article marketing is NOT just for getting backlinks to your site. It actually does generate traffic. People may find your article on a directory site for a keyword that your website is not ranked for. If the article is of quality content, they will be more likely to trust you. If they trust your writing, they will be compelled to click through to your website at the end of the article. Building trust is really what article marketing is about. Think about it this way. If you write a crappy article for the sole purpose of getting a back link and it ends up getting a lot of traffic, you will most likely not see any of the benefits of that traffic. The traffic will not transfer to your website because your article was trash.
How to Be Successful with Online Marketing and Promotion
The key to being successful with marketing online is by being consistent. It’s a never ending part of the job. Partially marketing and promoting yourself or your website will not get the job done. It’s something that must be done for the entire time you own that website. It’s just like an offline business. You can’t advertise for your business just once and expect to have a forever flow of customers. Sure, the initial advertising you do will bring in more customers, but eventually it will die off and you’ll need to do some more advertising…it’s the same way with online. You have to continually market (advertise) your website. If you don’t, you’ll be dead in the water because your competition will outdo you and your previous efforts will be a waste of time.
Moral of this article? Never stop promoting your website. Ever. 
If you’re just getting started online, you may want to read this. Beginners Mini Course for Making Money Online Without Investment
